There Is Always Hope
by Wanderlustlover
Summary: A meeting of two like minds, and hearts, for perhaps the breifest of dark moments.


"There is Always Hope"  
  
Ded: To Elunined for Christmas  
  
Reason: Because Elunied kept talking about the Aragorn, Eowyn, Arwen triangle of book/movie two and it got me thinking. I saw something in the movie and it brought my back to an idea for her.   
  
So here is a piece of holiday writing for her and my very first touch at Lord of The Rings fanficing.   
  
Eli: Hey. Merry Christmas. I hope you enjoy it.   
  
~~~~  
  
"Then I will die with them," he shouted at the top of his lungs, even as wonder, disgust, and confusion play across the delicate features of his friend's face before him. The jaw slackened and eyes both wide and bright at the boisterous reaction and the change to English from Elven.   
  
Jaw tightened in recoiling reaction, one cheek slightly pulled in as the eyes narrowed in the Elven pale face of Legolas before him, and he tried not to give into the surges within his own mind. Especially, due to his friends words. It was a lost cause. They were always lost causes until they were all proven wrong. He turned and spun on his heel, pressing through the crowds of villagers, old men, young, readying to fight.   
  
Pushing the door open with forceful shove he strode down the hallway a vision of weary hidden strength and rebellious anger. His hair hung around his face and his eyes were dark as he moved fast and dedicated through the halls, and throngs of people, till reaching his destination. A smaller room than most and unfilled now that the people had been hoarded down to the caves.   
  
It had two arches on each side, at the sides of the room, dividing it with benches and a table seated higher at the far enough. Shadows lurked everywhere amid the flickering candlelight. Perhaps it had once been a chapel hall, or a meeting room. It was so long ago, and unused, the scent of age hanging in the air. He closed the doors behind him, slamming them hard and reserved the urge to yell.  
  
It was all boiling up inside his skin. The memories, the choices, the chances, everything and everyone. All of the innocent lives that seemed so few against the magnanimous number of the evil standing against him. After all he has seen, after all he had been through, was this not enough? And the future did it not seem uncertain enough that it needed to add to him the fact he needed to make that future clear for others?  
  
Taking his sword, he threw it across the room, flung far from him with deadly aim. The silver of the sword flickered and flashed, as it slammed through the air in the small amount of candle light within the room. Watching it, holding his breath, feeling both a momentary release of calm and a surge of annoyance at himself, he let his shoulders sag and his head rest against the door.   
  
Until a woman stepped out from beyond one of the arcs, pacing across the further part of the room before the wall, as if she hadn't seen or noticed him. She only stopped when the sword flashed in front of her body and slammed point first into the wall. She looked from it, visibly in surprise and shock, to him down the hall even as he was raising toward her.   
  
She started catching her breathing, though she sounds neither affronted, nor afraid. "M-m'Lord, Aragon-"   
  
"Lady Eowyn," He called to her, apologetically, rounding the table toward her. "I apologize. I thought that I was al-"  
  
"Tell me why it is tonight the men -alone- will bandy swords and yell and die for the people of Rohan,"   
  
She interrupted his words without warning thought as she grabbed the hilt of his sword yanking it from the wall and pointing it toward him. Her clothes were nothing much better than the commoners she had spent days moving, nor had she changed from it given the choice. Her hair was loose about her shoulders, and her face looked troubled even beyond the bags under her eyes and the fear that tried to hide within them.  
  
"My uncle has ordered me to stay with the women and children." Her eyes narrowed on the sword she held point first toward him, before shifting to his face. Color blossomed in her cheeks, but not of a blush, but of anger and her voice hardened when she spoke. "I can fight as well as any man."  
  
"Your people down in the caves will need you just as much, if not more, Lady," Aragorn said, with a smooth tone, resigned somewhere in his mind to pulling up the next falling star around him. Watching her resigned expression at his words and the lowering of his sword, which he extended a hand, palm upward to receive back. "They will need you comfort and faith and presence as a shining beacon in the darkness of what comes to Helms Deep tonight. On this night could you deny them that?"  
  
Reluctantly releasing the blade to his waiting hand, she just shook her head. She hated that he was right at this moment the worst. It was one thing to ride into battle knowing you would be fighting for your life. But it was entirely another to sit and wait in the darkness hoping against all hope that when that door opened again it would be the right people on the other side of the door still.   
  
"No, I would not deny them." she said very softly. Then she looked back up to his face, pulling back to poised, even before the man who stood before her. Even looking soaked, dishelved and exhausted, there was an attraction she could not deny. "Men ready to fight and fight they will, while women and child huddle in the darkness, crying and praying."  
  
Not breaking from his gaze, the frankness of her face, even as she worried her lip, about to add something, she studied him very aware of the short distance between them. It was short a short distance and the darkness he has spoken of to her seemed not to be an allusion but a truth, an utter truth. The world right now was made up of so much darkness. Even in rooms as such.   
  
"But it is not too much, that even the best can help from feeling frustrated and hopeless," she said, looking down and reaching out to rest her first few fingers on the blade hilt of the sword put away, referencing what he'd just done. Raising her eyes, lightly and full, even in the flickering candlelight, she continued. "Even if only for a few moments, when no one can see you?"  
  
Standing so very close as she was, he wanted for a moment to reach out and comfort her. But less was even more than not appropriate. He didn't care if it would be unseemly for someone to walk in and find the kings' niece in the arms of the man who was about to lead their army to war. No, the thing it based upon was not that, but another set of eyes that haunted him in his mind now as he stared into hers.   
  
And those eyes made it only so easy not to reach up and touch the necklace hanging from his neck.   
  
"No," he replied, making no move to lighten his expression or front her. "It is not too much. Even for the best."  
  
Eowyn wasn't sure what went on behind those dark, pained eyes that were staring at her. He was so dark and full of mysterious, just bursting with life, with faith, with the intangible good that she couldn't see at the moment. She felt as thought she were cast adrift in a sea of chaos and utter darkness and try thought she might she could not see the light at the end of tunnel. Except when she was looking into those eyes.   
  
He was all the light she had right now, against a night coming so fast and threatening so violently to swallow them all. And she reached for it with all her might suddenly. It took her another two seconds to realized she'd suddenly launched herself at him from so close a distance and her lips were pressing against his. And then another few to realize he was kissing her back.   
  
To say she was surprised at her own action was an understatement to his. She had been standing in front of him and suddenly, one her hands was in his hair and her lips were touching his insistently. His first thought was that it had been so long since he'd held someone who felt soft. He'd hugged, patted the shoulders of and lived next to men of varying kinds for many mothers during this journey. Men were not specifically soft in any way, shape or form.  
  
And this was a foreign softness, a forbidden softness, that quickened desires in him best left alone. One that felt much too good to continue in the wake of the face that appeared in his mind when his eyes closed. So he pulled away abruptly his hands on her shoulders. So close that there was no missing the dazed look her eyes that turned slowly sour on realization or missing the pain and guilt that touched her eyes and fled them as his hand snaked, unconsciously, to touch the silver necklace around his neck.   
  
Eowyn pulled away then, turning to one side, her fingers raised to her lips, desire, despair and desperation surging through her. She didn't want to care that she don't it. She didn't want to care that he had rejected her till he pulled away. Tears gathered in her eyes and try as she might to push them away, it didn't work, as her throat felt suddenly dry and her chest tightened. She walked toward a window in the far back of the room, the dying rays of the suns light almost gone.   
  
"My brother is out there somewhere," she said slowly after a minute or two passed in completely silence, neither of them moving to say a word, to explain or apologize. "Since the moment he was banished only little information has reached us, and late in timing, of when and where he was. Of whether he was alive. I haven't heard anything of him in days. Almost a week now."   
  
"Take heart, he is probably out there fighting the same battles as we." Aragorn replied, approaching where she stood very slowly and carefully. "There is always hope."  
  
"Is there?" Eowyn asked looking back from the window to face him, tears streaming down her cheeks. "Who says?"  
  
She watched his expression turn troubled and she nodded vaguely, as if she might understand in the face of something he couldn't say, didn't want to talk about, or even someone he didn't want to about even now. Maybe especially now, after what she'd done. She sniffled and reached up to wipe some of her tears away with the back of her long sleeve.   
  
After a minute, she gathered her courage, as the sun slipped away completely and stated, "You never told me her name."   
  
"Arwen," Aragorn said very quietly, after a pause while he tried to decide whether to answer, or delay her from learning things that he knew at this moment would hurt her more. "Arwen Evenstar."  
  
"A beautiful name," Eowyn replied. Yes, she probably is beautiful, too. Amazingly beautiful to have captured your heart and to have such a tight hold over it and you love her completely, too. "How long has it been since you saw her?"   
  
Every time I close my eyes and even more so when I sleep, he thought, though he didn't say it out loud. "A very long time."   
  
"And where is she now?"   
  
"She goes to the lands of the undying," he said, after the breadth of a pause. She was not in her home and how he knew was not so important as knowing. He simply knew like so many other things were between them. "Like most of her kind."  
  
"She does not stay to fight at your side?" Eowyn asked tentatively, arrogantly, as she walked from the window and from the close area between them. She was standing in the middle of the room, when she looked back at him. "Forgive me, that was?cruel. I know how she must feel to have someone she loves so much, so far from reach and in so much danger."  
  
"I should make ready," he told her, letting her slowly move about leaving as she already was. Guilt and apprehension rode side by side with strength and courage. The night was falling all around them and the rumbling of the land whispered of the war it knew was coming.   
  
Eowyn looked at him and she wondered whether she should regret kissing him. He was dedicated to another woman. Her memory hung on him bright as the necklace that hung around his neck. He was spoken for, but he was a man like any other. But she was right. He was the light in the darkness. He was the one reason she would not fear this night. Because in those dark eyes Rohan's dawn sat and she knew that if he promised to bring them safely thought the night that they would be brought to dawn or he would die trying.  
  
And she'd already lived long enough with the thought of him dead.   
  
"Don't pass on tonight," she said, half pleading, looking at him a moment longer, deciding that she would not regret. And she turned walking toward the door as she said, "This place of undying sounds far away and hard to get to and I'd hate to have to deliver that message to someone, like me, who will be waiting in darkness with only tears and prayers as their shield this night."  
  
"We will all do our best," Aragorn said, as he watched he walk down the center of the room. He could see in the center of his mind the type of life he could have had with this woman. Fierce, spirited, independent and unafraid to show her opinion or act on her feelings. "It must be enough."  
  
"There is always hope," Eowyn said, looking back from the door to him, giving him a bright smile, even as it broke her heart. "You just said so a few minutes ago. There is always hope."  
  
She stared at his expression for a moment and thought perhaps he did understand her just that much more after these few moments, as she felt she understood him that small bit more than either of them had before. Then she nodded her head and opened the door, stopping only to say, "Good battle, Lord Aragorn," as she shut the door.   
  
Closing the door behind her, she laid her head upon it and felt a descending wave of grief that she brushed off. She couldn't fall into her own shadows right now. She had to be the bearer of good news to a people who had but the thinnest string of hope, who had said goodbye to their sons, husbands and fathers now. Taking a deep breath and step, she almost ran into the person standing right in front of her.   
  
Luckily for him though, that grace and agility came to his race so easily. He side stepped where she came to life when he'd been about to speak. She had seemed perturbed and he hadn't wanted to bother her, even though what he was searching for was quite of importance.   
  
"Have you seen Aragorn?" Legolas asked, the impetuously innocent and energetic vibe to him seeming not even swayed by the coming battle yet. His eyes were wide and open, unhidden from his thoughts it seemed. If only all the rest of them could look so certain and sure as he did now.   
  
"Yes, he's in there" Eowyn said, stepping away from the door. "He should be of better mood perhaps than when he departed company earlier."  
  
The tall, pale elf gave her a curiously inquisitive expression, wondering what she meant, but she side stepped him this time and started walking down the hallway. To her prides relief she did not look back nor think about turning around. They all had their battled this night. Some had a battle against swords and teeth, and others against shadows and fears.   
  
But one way or another, they would all be fighting this night. 


End file.
